On The Edge
by Calendar
Summary: There are many methods of torture. Naruto has a bad case of poison ivy, and his teammates have to take care of him.


Title: On The Edge

Author: Calendar   
Rating: PG-13 / T  
Disclaimer: Absolutely, totally and completely not mine.  
Spoilers: None  
Pairings: NaruSasuSaku, if you want.  
Notes: Written for 3measures, an OT3 theme community on livejournal. Theme was 'poison ivy'.  
Summary: There are many methods of torture. Naruto has a bad case of poison ivy, and his teammates have to take care of him.

xxx

"Hold _still_, Naruto!" Sakura was close to giving up and tossing him right out of the house. Underneath her hands, the aforementioned boy tried to squirm away as she slathered the pink lotion on him.

"But it itches, Sakura-chan!" He turned to look at her beseechingly and received a punch for his efforts.

"If you'd _hold still_, maybe it wouldn't itch so badly!" She shoved him back down, muttering foully under her breath, wondering why she'd gotten stuck with the biggest idiot in Konoha on her genin squad. "How did you manage to get poison ivy over your entire body? Weren't you wearing clothes?"

An embarrassed grin was her only answer and Sakura wondered why she wasn't surprised. "We're definitely going to need the extra bottle Sasuke went to buy. This one's nearly empty already." She sighed with all the duress of a girl forced on a daily basis to deal with two of the most impossible men to ever exist.

Mid-sigh, something occurred to her and her mouth snapped close mid-yawn. "Wait, if you weren't wearing clothes... then..." A look of comical horror suffused her face as Naruto started to turn a bright, brilliant red. "No! Not... not... on your..."

There was a long silence.

Sakura stared at Naruto's hands, which had already been slathered with lotion and wrapped in bandages to keep Naruto from getting lotion over the entire house. She trembled very minutely, and then with a very pointed, projected nonchalance, she returned to spreading the calamine lotion on Naruto's back. "Well, I'll just leave you and Sasuke to deal with that."

-

Sasuke fairly radiated frustration. His part of the lotion application had put him in a very bad mood. "He won't stop itching. I tied him to a chair, and he figured out a way to use the chair to scratch his back!"

Sakura felt like banging her head into a wall a few dozen times. "The calamine lotion is supposed to relieve the itching."

"Well, _it's not working_," Sasuke snarled.

Sakura considered the statistical probabilities of getting brain damage if she did slam her head into the wall. "Do you think the bandages could have absorbed all the lotion?"

Sasuke looked like he was about to explode. Sakura could understand that. "No."

She thought brain damage might be a fair price to pay for stress relief of that magnitude. "Did you check?"

"I don't have to. I put on a _lot_ of lotion."

She stared at him. Had he always had that huge vein popping out on his forehead, or was that a new development?

-

They sat back-to-back in the middle of the room, hands covering their ears. The howls coming from Naruto's bedroom were very impressive.

Sakura was purple from the constant rage and frustration she'd been feeling for the past few two days. "WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM!" She screamed to be heard over the terrible shrieks, but her question was still lost.

Sasuke turned around, looking like he was about to kill something. "WHAT?"

"I SAID, WHAT DID YOU DO!"

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Naruto stopped screaming and commenced pounding his feet against the wooden floor. No doubt he'd gone hoarse. Once their ears stopped ringing, Sakura repeated her question, this time with added glare of death.

Sasuke had the grace to hesitate and look slightly guilty. "I told him the Hokage said he wasn't allowed to remove the bandages for a week, and if he tried to scratch any more, I'd make sure he didn't get any ramen the entire time."

Sakura opened her mouth with an intent to start reprimanding him, then closed it, looking thoughtful. "Yeah, I probably would've done the same thing. But why'd he start screaming?"

Sasuke went from looking slightly guilty to moderately guilty before he wiped his face clean of any expression at all. "And then I may have tried to force-feed him vegetables."

The howling started up again.

-

When she walked in the house with a flurry of packages and bags, she found Sasuke exhaustedly sulking in the kitchen. Well, most people would have considered the expression on his face to be a scowl, but she knew the difference. When he sulked, the scowl was more a frown than a grimace. She didn't say anything about the dark bags under his eyes, as she had matching bags under her own eyes. They hadn't gotten much sleep last night.

She set all her packages on the table, grabbing one and carrying it over to the cabinets. She set it down as she rummaged through them, pulling out a bowl, feeling the stress pulling at her. "He still start up the screaming whenever you walk into the room?"

He only grunted, but she knew that was an affirmative.

She set the bowl on the counter and opened the bag of take-out. Ichiraku didn't usually do take-out, but they'd made an exception when she'd told them it was for Naruto. She poured the ramen into the bowl and turned to grab the chopsticks when a sudden thought occurred to her.

In shock at her own idiocy, she walked to the medicine cabinet in a daze. "Sasuke..."

She got another grunt in response.

"Sasuke..."

He turned to look at her with a scowl (clearly an annoyed scowl as opposed to the sulking scowl), "Yeah, what?"

With a beaming, joyful smile, she held up a bottle of pills for him to see.

After a second of startled surprise, he smiled back at her.

-

Sakura fed him the ramen since he couldn't hold the chopsticks with his bandaged hands while Sasuke leaned against the opposite wall watching with a scowl. She kept getting broth all over the bandages on his face, but Naruto didn't seem to mind.

After he slurped up the last bite, Naruto's smile was nearly as big as it had been before he'd spent the past three days covered in lotion, bandaged and tied to a chair. "So, so, Sakura-chan! You're gonna let me go soon, right? I don't even itch very much anymore!"

"Hmph," Sasuke snorted. "The Hokage said a week."

Naruto's pout wasn't nearly as effective when he looked like a mummy. He turned to Sakura for confirmation.

She shrugged. "That's what she said."

He scowled in response (it wasn't very impressive when compared to Sasuke's, but it was a good effort), and then melted into a teary face. "But... but... Sakura-chan!" His plea was ruined by the giant yawn that overcame him just after he finished pleading.

He frowned sleepily. "Hey, why am I so tired?" He yawned again. "Sa--" He yawned again, blinking rapidly. "Hey..."

The last thing he saw before he fell asleep was the twin looks of utter happiness on the faces of his teammates.

-

Sasuke couldn't ever remember feeling quite this giddy before. The feelings of frustration and loss of control that had been plaguing him since Naruto had come back to the house covered in oozing rash were gone. He suspected that he might have giggled at some point, but it was hidden by the little whoops of glee Sakura kept giving every few seconds.

"You," Sasuke said firmly, "should've thought of that _days_ ago."

She shot him a quick glare, but the relief was too profound for her to stay annoyed or point out that he hadn't thought of it either. "I'm a genius. An utter genius."

He nodded with a small smile, looking over at her from where he was lying prone on the wooden floor a few feet from their snoring teammate. A few feet away, she smiled back at him from her own place on the floor. He breathed in deeply. "How long will he be out?"

She rolled onto her side to face him, smiling dreamily. "The sedatives will keep him out for roughly forty-eight hours. And when he wakes up, he'll be too drowsy to protest when we give him more. Another forty-eight hours and the rash will be gone."

A long sigh escaped him before he could help it. A light pink blush settled on his cheeks when he remembered the indiginities she'd been witness to while he'd be going out of his mind with frustration. As if she were thinking the same thing, an identical pink flush appeared on her cheeks.

In unison, they said, "Let's never talk about this again."

And secretly, both decided if Naruto ever rolled around in another patch of poison ivy, they'd kill him.


End file.
